Yes, this is The Great Filter. We fix it or fade away.

Agents provocateurs have been with us all along. It’s an old tactic. I have run into some myself.

What’s new is algorithmic manipulation.

• regular, persistent, angry protests (necessary and foundational)
• small, medium, large organizations in coalition, loosely coordinated, some ad hoc
• pressure and advocacy at all scales of government
• strong, educational and propagandistic cultural surge across all forms of media
• a meaningful conversation at most kitchen tables, and coalition of former adversaries
• a vanguard of shitdisturber vandals and saboteurs to draw ire and attention in useful ways (dumb fucks usually mess this up, the circleA tattoo is so shallow)
• critical mass, then the changes just cascade

This is how history teaches us about change. Read Antonio Gramsci, it’s useful.

It takes way more work to build something than tear it down. Keep it up!

I fear that standard civics and activism isn’t going to be enough. The culture has to shift away from cults and individualistic myths.

Thank you for your sacrifice in this matter.

You attribute an uneducated, uncivil approach to human nature, but I have been in human queues around the world, and they vary hugely based on cultural and social differences.

What you think is human nature seems to actually be driving culture in your region.

Yesterday I had a swasticar driver actually let me in on a disorderly merge. I was amazed, it was a first. Clue: nothing about Hondas changes people to be better. Tesla and BMW drivers are just shittier at sharing. This is culturally allowed.

Well yes, society functions only with cooperation. Uncivil behaviour ends with violence and dismay.

However 3s usually allows for slow adjustments which alleviate caterpillaring.

3 fucking seconds

The answer is a simple 3 second gap.

That’s it, just 3-mississippi (or 3-onethousand) seconds behind the car in front of you and most of the avoidable jams go away.

CS grads are in the worst position ever. University is often mistaken for vocational education, however that would be a technical college.

I have spent a lot of time crossing between a practical education environment, aimed at production skills, and university, aimed at thinking ability and abstract skills.

Honestly, my experience is that students are much more capable in a production environment after a two week boot camp than after three years of university on a roughly parallel topic. However, the non-idiots in the academic case will be able to understand arguments about the context of what they are doing better.

The point is that a philosophy degree might be more employable than a CS degree in some situations. The dude who cofounded Flickr and Slack was working off of an english degree. Use your degree for understanding and some projects for knowledge.

I also have a humanities degree and work in IT, with a wide range of applied skills I learned from necessity instead of a prof.

So create the necessity for skills by making useful shit, or even just fixing things. Find friends and make a silly app. Volunteer at a nonprofit and improve their CRM database. Build a homelab that you share with roommates. Find the local permacomputing group and help them turn all those shitty win10 obsolete machines into sleek linux machines. Ignore money and employment as task criteria for a few years, or freelance IT gigs.

Solve real world problems for real experience.

Or, like, you know, they got bumped and it’s get a hotel or fly another airline.

One shitpost meme video in your downloads folder = hundreds of Word docx files. Pick the low hanging fruit.

Oh yeah, those shitgibbons are always lurking around the margins looking for an opportunity. It’s an eternal problem, and another actual fascist conspiracy is driving it right now. Fuck Stephen Harper and the IDU.

Most discussions about Libor in the early slashdot/digg/reddit fora were not ethnically aligned, the craven ones got downvotes at first. I never read any upvoted threads about NSA abuses that referenced hate speech. No one notably mentioned Jews or other hate targets regarding UFO coverups until space laser MTG. I also think those posts and threads were downvoted and moderated at first.

A lot of the r/conspiracy discussion in the early 2010’s still had quite a few left-leaning anti authoritarian participants, buoyed by recently being right about some large actual conspiracies, and they were numerous enough to repress obvious racism. It didn’t become a lost battle until the Q brigade showed up.

People forget. Back in the day it was talk about Libor and NSA abusing FISA and UFO coverups, much of which was actual conspiracy not theory. It wasn’t clearly aligned politically, just suspicious of power. The trumplings didn’t show up for quite a few years and quickly shit all over the floor.

Cobol mavens burned both ends of the candle and made bank, while making banks work.

Many were old enough to retire after that.

Did you mean Media Access Controllers, or macOS?

Hm, I guess an encyclopedia article is more relevant than a dictionary definition, so sure. I was using the looser secondary definition… in this case an elision that references a dialect in order to call up regional relevance to the opinion expressed.

I dunno, cf. 1.b definition of idiom in the OED: dialect usage, and 2.a is dialect usage for effect. Maybe the definition is changing with the ages, or your usage is overly strict.

Well we can argue over the niceties of the word idiom, but as it’s referring to the way the word is pronounced in specific regions of North America, it qualifies as meeting one of the definitions of idiom.

Elision refers more to the absence of an understood word, such as saying ‘my bad’.

My bad, elision can also refer to slurring syllables together, so it’s both.

In the English language, specifically North American dialects, this is a form of idiom.

Yes, we call that “structural racism”.